June 2010 - All Saints Church, Loughborough

All Saints Church, Loughborough was the chosen venue for the Loughborough Orchestra’s summer concert, “A Celebration of Music and Song for a Summer Evening”. The concert was given in aid of Coram Adoption East Midlands, one of four Coram teams in the country, and as a result of the concert, the charity has been able to set up a music therapy scheme for children. The soloist was the mezzo-soprano, Corinne Lang one of the project’s workers, who sang three groups of songs. The concert also saw the last appearance of Liz Thomas as the orchestra’s conductor after 17 years loyal service. Since 1993 Liz has tirelessly conducted the orchestra in many inspiring performances of a wide variety of music, ranging from Handel to Honegger, and from Beethoven to Bartok.

The concert opened with Ferdinand Hérold’s exuberant overture, “Zampa”, in which the brass section excelled; this was followed by Antonin Dvorák’s wistful Slavonic Dance in E minor. Corinne Lang’s first two songs were well-known operatic arias by Handel and Gluck; they were followed by the famous waltz from “The Sleeping Beauty” by Tchaikovsky. Corinne Lang’s next two songs were an aria from Saint-Saëns’ opera “Samson et Dalila” and “Songs my mother taught me” by Dvorák, and the first half of the concert ended with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of six movements from Händel’s “Water Music”.

The second half of the programme was generally of a lighter nature, opening with John Smith’s amusing performance of The Acrobat by John Greenwood and Leroy Anderson’s popular “Fiddle-faddle”. Corinne Lang’s last two songs were both from the American stage, “One Hand, One Heart”, from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, and Jerome Kern’s “Can’t Help Lovin’ dat Man” from “Showboat”. The concert ended with rousing performances of Aaron Copland’s “Hoe-Down” from “Rodeo”, and excerpts from Bizet’s “Carmen”.

The varied programme of popular music kept the orchestra on its toes and was enjoyed by the large enthusiastic audience, some of whom were heard to say on leaving “I didn’t know classical music could be such fun.”